GLOBOX PRODUCTION COMPANY HQ
Design Team:
Gabriel Cáceres, Daniel Lazo.
Collaborators:
John Miller, Tomislav Mímica.
Location:
Santiago de Chile / Chile
Built Area:
140 m2
Project Year:
2018
Materials:
Polycarbonate sheets, glass, wood.
Photography:
Felipe Fontecilla
Description
Since the late 90’s, an early 20th century house in downtown Santiago has been home to an important part of Chile’s underground electronic music scene. The “Santo Remedio Bar and Restaurant”, occupying its first floor, it is a venue where renowned local DJ’s have played their first sets, and host to an important list of international stars. When the owner’s production company -responsible for important music festivals across the country- decided to relocate their operations to the second floor of the house, they required for a radical transformation of the former hair saloon space. Multiple precarious conversions had left their mark all across the old adobe-and-timber structure, and it was in a weakened state. Adobe craftmanship has become a lost art, and as such restoration of this kind has become quite expensive. A limited budget and time schedule rendered the possibility of restoring the walls to its original state, a dead end. Striping the adobe from the dividing walls and reinforcing the timber skeleton was needed but budget constraints meant that it was to be done in localized form, leaving the interior walls an unsightly mish-mash between leftovers of the previous conversions (fiber cement, sheet rock and tin panels haphazardly attached) and patches of naked structure.
The project then became the act of sheeting this mess, front and back, with semi-translucent polycarbonate panels, turning the chaotic patchwork of materials into an abstract array of shadows that change depending of the source of the light. During the day, sunlight would give the plastic warmer tones, and LED geometric lines of light would tint it a blue hue at night. The same idea was then repeated for the main office room ceiling by hanging a metal mesh of expanded aluminum, and again for the meeting room with a hanging polycarbonate ceiling below a skylight the whole size of the room. The few divisions of the entire space where handled with aluminum sliding doors, and the galvanized steel pipes of the electrical network where left exposed. For the connecting corridors, a loose spaghetti-like hanging lamp was designed out of LED tubes. To counter this rather cold industrial look, a grainy German oak wood was selected for the flooring, the one and only expensive item of the whole endeavor.
The stark contrast between the brisk irregularity of the adobe walls still exposed, the refined dignity of the oak, and the machine precision of both the translucent plastic and aluminum mesh, do this time make for a more sightly mix of ingredients.
